Renato Canova Speaks

Renown coach coming to Colorado Springs for Afro-American Project

[Editor's Note: Beginning June 6, famed Italian distance running coach Renato Canova will be in Colorado Springs for a two-week period as part of the Afro-American Initiative, a training camp organized by the American Distance Project that will bring together top American and African runners. We've pulled this 2009 RunningTimes.com exclusive from our archives as the program gets underway later this week.]

Throughout history there have always been those intrepid souls responsible for the guidance of athletes with both unique genetic talents and the singular ability to fully utilize such talents. They’re the men and women who hover over stopwatches in wet, cold, snowy and windy as well as sunny conditions. They’re the ones scratching out the weeks of workout schedules that will bring dramatic improvements to their charges. They must pick horses for courses. Yet those same chosen thinclads must be properly guided and encouraged to the fine levels of fitness that stop clocks early and dazzles spectators and peers alike.

If there are any secrets, they must include having a discerning eye, a mind that will quickly learn from experience, and a penchant for studying everything historically that works or doesn’t in the arcane realm of coaching. These magicians and their athletes will both succeed and fail, the trick being to tip in the right direction the scales of enormous accomplishment and disastrous failure.

One unique individual having absorbed the elusive tools of coaching wizardry is Renato Canova of Italy. He began humbly in 1956, when, as a 12-year-old watching a televised track meet among Italy, Belgium and France, the young lad decided he would someday be a coach, perhaps of the Italian national team.

While teaching with a degree in physical education, Canova realized early on that his own running was not good enough to be a professional athlete. Yet his childhood dream was realized when, in 1969, he became the youngest national coach in Italy. Two years of work with junior women was followed by an appointment to work with 400m runners and hurdlers. Success came when the Italian 1600m relay team won bronze medals.

Primo EducationWhen the Italian federation then requested that Canova take over the mentoring of decathletes and pentathletes, the eager sponge of real and vicarious experience did so from 1977 to 1986. In parallel, Canova and his wife both coached for the Fiat Club. When Fiat became Iveco, Canova assumed the head coaching reins during an era in which three team members (Pietro Minnea, Sara Simeoni, Mauricio Damiano) claimed 1980 Olympic gold medals.

In 1987, the federation tapped Canova to begin coaching middle- and long-distance women, while his lifelong friend Lucio Gigliotti was coaching the men. Among Canova’s protégées, Maria Curatolo took an IAAF World 15K Road Running Champs bronze. Although then experiencing a bad accident sidelining her for two years. Curatolo eventually returned to claim a European Champs marathon silver, and in 1995 Canova mentored Ornella Ferra to a World Champs marathon bronze. Then came understudy Maura Viceconte, who would set a 2:23:37 Italian record for the marathon.

Canova was never one to sit idly waiting for developments. Early on his Italian colleagues and he ventured to Poland to observe how the best middle-distance runners at that time were trained, then to France where they could try to discover the methodologies of Michael Jazy in setting a European 5,000m record. Among the knowledge-thirsty travelers from Italy were Gigliotti, who would eventually coach Olympic marathon champs Gelindo Bordin and Stefano Baldini; Gianpaolo Lenzi, who would advise 2:09 marathoner Salvatore Bettiol; and Georgio Rondelli, who would mentor track world champions Alberto Cova and Francesco Panetta. The budding coaches soaked up as much of the techniques known during the era they could manage.